Hierarchy construction: hierarchy structure of supply chain functions which categorized into 5 group ups by experts was drawn (Figure 2).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Hierarchy structure of pharmaceutical supply chain risks.
Comparative judgments (pairwise comparison): after developing the structure, pairwise comparisons were done by experts through questionnaires to determine the relative importance of the function management in the pharmaceutical supply chain.
Aggregation of comparative judgment: using geometric average
Synthesize the results to find the overall score of each function [31]
Simple additive weighting (SAW) method: SAW is a simple and most applicable multi-attribute decision method which is known as a weighted linear combination or scoring technique. This method is based on the weighted average and an evaluation score is measured by multiplying the normalized value of each criteria for the objectives with the importance of the criteria. Then the objectives could be ranked and objective with the highest score is selected as the preferred one [32].
Based on SAW technique, final score of each risk is calculated and ranked as follow [33]: